Multiage Curriculum Overview

Social Curriculum

Our social curriculum is based on the Responsive Classroom.  The first few weeks of the school year focus on establishing routines and community building.  A sense of community helps children become sensitive to their peers’ feelings and needs. Students interact in various activities focusing on sharing, listening, inclusion, cooperation, respect, responsibility, and self-control.

Language Arts

Our reading and writing programs are tiered to meet the needs of all learners.  Our writing curriculum encourages children to write for a variety of audiences.  One of the children’s most popular forms of writing is personal experience stories.  Multiage writers grow upon a developmental continuum ranging from labeling pictures with beginning sounds to writing imaginative, detailed paragraphs. Children write across all areas of the curriculum, including explanations of problem solving in mathematics.  

Reading opportunities occur throughout the day.  There is shared whole class reading, reading groups and individual reading.  Reading groups are small, allowing for individual instruction. Students read both fiction and non-fiction.  Reading packets include phonics, vocabulary and specific story activities.  Scaffolding is used to both support and stretch children, but not frustrate them.

Mathematics

Our mathematics program meets current Massachusetts State Frameworks. There is a strong emphasis on using examples from real life situations.  By making connections between their knowledge and experiences, children learn skills in a meaningful context.  Areas if instruction include:  Number Sense and Operations, Patterns, Relations and Algebra, Geometry, Measurement, Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability.  Children are expected to become fluent in addition and subtraction facts through 20 by the end of their second year.  In our multiage program, mathematics is grade specific.  Therefore, your child may receive math instruction from another multiage teacher.

Science and Social Studies

Our social studies and science curriculums are connected to a thematic unit.  

Thematic units are year-long units of study that connect all areas of the curriculum.  Students are able to see the “big picture” and make logical connections to other areas of study.  Some examples are Whales and Whaling, 

Lighthouses Around The World, and Farming On Martha’s Vineyard.  The units are rotated, so children have a different focus each year.

Scientific investigations center on student questions, observations and conclusions.  Our social studies curriculum focuses on exploration of customs, events, places and landmarks from around the world.  Students also study historical events, figures, symbols and national holidays related to the United States of America.

In two years, children learn all of the social studies and science frameworks for both first and second grade.